Bellefleur

Name: Bellefleur
Brand: Tantor Audio
Availability: InStock
Author: Joyce Carol Oates
ISBN: 9781705204108

Author: Joyce Carol Oates

Series: Gothic Saga #1

Narrator: Xe Sands

Unabridged: 27 hr 28 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 03/31/2020

Categories: Fiction, Family Life

Synopsis

A wealthy and notorious clan, the Bellefleurs live in a region not unlike the Adirondacks, in an enormous mansion on the shores of mythic Lake Noir. They own vast lands and profitable businesses, they employ their neighbors, and they influence the government. A prolific and eccentric group, they include several millionaires, a mass murderer, a spiritual seeker who climbs into the mountains looking for God, a wealthy noctambulist who dies of a chicken scratch.

Bellefleur traces the lives of several generations of this unusual family. At its center is Gideon Bellefleur and his imperious, somewhat psychic, very beautiful wife, Leah, their three children (one with frightening psychic abilities), and the servants and relatives, living and dead, who inhabit the mansion and its environs. Their story offers a profound look at the world's changeableness, time and eternity, space and soul, pride and physicality versus love. Bellefleur is an allegory of caritas versus cupiditas, love and selflessness versus pride and selfishness. It is a novel of change, baffling complexity, mystery.

About Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is the author of such national bestsellers as The Falls, Blonde, and We Were the Mulvaneys. Her other titles include Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense, which features "The Woman in the Window," selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 2017; The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror, which won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection; and Jack of Spades. She is the recipient of the National Book Award for Them and the 2010 President's National Humanities Medal.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Michael on June 08, 2017

Oates is a modern master of the Gothic novel, and this sprawling, wondrous book really showcases her command of language and how she can push her prose right to the edge of satire while still keeping that Gothic intensity. My only minor complaint is that it's a bit long and meandering in parts, but......more

Goodreads review by Laura on October 27, 2011

BELLEFLEUR by Joyce Carol Oates is ranked as one of my most favorite novels of all time...I love this book! I savored this gothic tale cover to cover and didn't want it to end. It possesses a life of its own, the characters became ghosts that would haunt me after setting it aside after a short readi......more

Goodreads review by L.S. on April 03, 2020

I found this novel, above all, to be exuberant, ambitious, bold, and extremely readable. JCO has wrung all the suggestion and menace she could from her sumptuous setting. Not familiar with the author's infinite body of work - I have only stumbled across a few short stories, liked them, and never sou......more

Goodreads review by Sharyl on September 18, 2016

I enjoyed this book tremendously. It's a Gothic tale and a family saga that may put one in mind of Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude: in both tales, reality must be suspended, time skips around, and the endings are similiar. However, Bellefleur is written in a completely different style, and i......more

Goodreads review by DeAnna on March 10, 2019

A gothic family saga, complete with lunatic relatives, serial killers, mythological monsters, absurd occurences, strange distortions of place and time, and cats. This book was freaking huge. At first, I was like, "Why am I doing this to myself?" Then I started to pick up on some of the little discrep......more